Meadows catches Rogers in U.S. Congressional race fundraising

Republican Mark Meadows has out fund-raised his competitor 2-to-1 this quarter, but the two candidates for the U.S. Congress are almost neck and neck in the overall money race.

Not counting candidate contributions to their own campaigns, Meadows and Democrat Hayden Rogers have raised about the same amount since the beginning of their campaigns — however, Rogers still leads by several thousand dollars.

Rogers’ to-date total is $690,936, while Meadows has raised $647,381.

Meadows was significantly behind going in to the third quarter of the year; however, during the past three months he has been able to turn his fund-raising around.

“We are very, very grateful,” Meadows said.

Meadows, a real estate developer from Cashiers, started out the campaign with eight challengers in the May primary. He was then subject to a second primary, or run-off election, against one of the Republican runner-ups in July. The Republican Party could not officially throw its weigh behind Meadows until July 17 when he won the second primary.

“Once you are the nominee, it comes a little bit easier,” Meadows said.

Third-quarter fund-raising reports were released Monday by the Federal Elections Commission.

After raising less than $90,000 the second quarter, Meadows said he planned to make bigger strides in the money race and since has held a number of fund-raisers to boost his numbers — a strategy he hopes to continue. He raised $418,909 in the third quarter.

“We were obviously having to play catch up with Hayden,” Meadows said. “We were having to do the best we could to raise money.”

The previous quarter, Rogers brought in twice as much money as Meadows. However, this quarter, Rogers collected $198,344 — only about $20,000 more than he raised the prior quarter.

“We are humbled by the overwhelming grassroots support our campaign has continued to receive from people across Western North Carolina,” said Whitney Mitchell, spokeswoman for Rogers’campaign, in an email. Rogers is a conservative Democrat from Robbinsville who spent six years as U.S. Rep. Heath Shuler’s chief of staff.

Rogers’ campaign did not specifically say how they planned to boost fund-raising efforts as the election heads into the home stretch, but said they would keep working to get Rogers’ platform out to the electorate.

“We are going to continue doing what we’ve done all along — focus on meeting as many people as possible and getting our message out across the 11th District,” Mitchell said in the email.

Money race

The following amounts come from federal election finance reports filed by the candidates in October and go through the third quarter.